Windows 10 has been out for almost two and a half years, and while it is the go to OS for newly bought PCs – it is lagging behind on older machines.
New statistics from NetMarketShare have revealed that Windows 10 still has a long way to go before it overtakes Windows 7 – which was released back in July 2009.
Latest research shows that Windows 10 is increasing its market share, but is still less popular than the older Windows 7.
NetMarketShare stats shows Windows 10 saw its OS market share grow in December 2017 to 32.93 per cent – a 0.98 per cent increase on the previous month.
And while Windows 7 saw its market share drop by a slight 0.04 per cent last month, it still has a hefty 43.08 per cent chunk of the operating system market.
It means that the eight year old OS is currently the world’s most popular operating system.
Other older versions of Windows are also far from defunct.
Windows 8.1 hold a 5.72 per cent OS market share, while Windows XP – released back in 2001 – has a 5.18 per cent market share.
BetaNews calculated that it could take another nine months before Windows 10 overtakes Windows 7.
That’s if Windows 10 grows at its current rate and Windows 7 declines as it did during December 2017.
Microsoft had initially offered a free upgrade route for PC users running older versions of Windows to entice them towards Windows 10.
That offer officially ended on July 29 2016.
However, there were a number of routes that still remained open to PC users hoping to get a free Windows 10 upgrade.
One of those options was the assistive technology route, which previously had no end date.
This Windows 10 free download offer was available to those who use assistive technology, and there was a potentially wide umbrella of people who qualify.
But towards the end of last year the Redmond-based tech giant revealed that the assistive technology free upgrade route would end on December 31 2017.
The assistive technology site was updated to say: “If you use assistive technologies, you can upgrade to Windows 10 at no cost as Microsoft continues our efforts to improve the Windows 10 experience for people who use these technologies.
“Please take advantage of this offer before it expires on December 31, 2017.”
But 2018 has kicked off and the ‘upgrade now’ button on the assistive technology page is still active.
It remans to be seen how much longer this will remain open, so – if you qualify and are looking to upgrade to Windows 10 – now is your chance to do so.
The importance of running the latest version of Windows on PCs was underlined by a recent Google blog post.
It was claimed that Microsoft have been patching out security bugs in Windows 10 but not immediately rolling those out to Windows 7 and 8 users.
This lag in updates leaves potentially hundreds of millions computers at risk of an attack.
The exploits that hackers and malware are taking advantage of is being fixed in the big Windows 10 releases.
However, this is only slowly filtering back to Windows 7 and 8 in the form of monthly software updates.
The news was revealed by researchers on Google’s Project Zero team.
It’s feared cybercriminals comparing the various builds of Windows will notice these holes in earlier versions of Windows and take advantage of it.
In a blog post, Google Project Zero researcher Mateusz Jurczyk said: “Microsoft is known for introducing a number of structural security improvements and sometimes even ordinary bug fixes only to the most recent Windows platform.
“This creates a false sense of security for users of the older systems, and leaves them vulnerable to software flaws which can be detected merely by spotting subtle changes in the corresponding code in different versions of Windows.”